Photograph courtesy of the Jaegers Family

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It’s All in the Hands

Our writer tries her hand at psychometry

It was almost irresistible to us to ask for a demonstration of the Psi Squad’s abilities. “We don’t do dog-and-pony shows,” squad director Lance Daniel informed us. The squad had done one for the BBC a few years ago, and it had turned out badly. Though Daniel correctly identified several details about the chosen target—among other things, that it was a large building containing World War I memorabilia, with large oil torches in front of it and a parade ground nearby, they e-mailed him back: “A total miss. Thanks for giving it a go.” The target was Ataturk’s museum in Turkey, which does indeed possess all of those characteristics. “I wrote back,” he says. “I was mad—they’d wasted my time—I said, ‘Well, how are any of these things wrong?’ They said, ‘Well, you didn’t say, ‘Ataturk’s museum,’—and I laughed. I’m not God. In a police context, would you want me to tell you they’re sitting at Denny’s right now, at the corner of 33rd and J, and here’s their cell number?

Plus, I think it would be more interesting if you tried it yourself.”

He FedExed an envelope, containing six sealed envelopes and a tiny zipper-lock bag of dirt, to our offices. Over the phone he took notes as I held each envelope and tried to peer inside it with my mind. The hand I used definitely made a difference: One photo of a redheaded friend of Daniel’s—not, by the way, Bevy Jaegers before she took to dyeing her hair—came up, in the left hand, as the color orange and the word “Halloween” (the woman was wearing black pointy shoes); in the right, it registered as a black-and-white image of a family standing next to a car and a tree in the snow. Another impression was of an old man surrounded by whiteness. “Hospital” was the word that came to mind. It was a wedding. There were plenty of other odd—and definitely incorrect—images, including a bear hanging out at the edge of a lake.

But the dirt was interesting (apparently dirt or any other physical object is easier to read than a photograph in an envelope).

With the packet of dirt in my left hand, I concentrated. All I could see was a Jeep, stuck in a video-game–like landscape, stuck in the mud, its wheels churning. What kind of Jeep? Daniel asked. Totally plain, I say, the kind with the metal bars. What color is it? A bland, blah color, was all I could tell him. What do the people do there? They’re farmers. What kind of place? I wasn’t sure. What popped out of my mouth was, “It’s hard to get to. It’s been trampled on, but it shouldn’t have been.”
 
I was sure I was bombing. “You’re doing better than you think,” he chuckled.

It turned out that the dirt was from a Vietnam War memorial in Sacramento. Unlike Bevy Jaegers, I didn’t see people dying, or soldiers, or dog tags. There were no dramatic Hollywood effects, just a slide show of weird little impressions that I figured didn’t add up to much. But, as Bevy once said, she started out as “totally untalented” and got better only after lots of practice. For a first run, I’ll totally take it.